The Trinity

(For those of you intensely uninterested in matters of theology, feel free to skip this entry. And please don’t say I didn’t warn you.--There's more fun stuff later like info on Sara's Race, Maori, Cheese, etc.)
It’s been a few weeks since I finished my course on the Trinity. I gained a great deal of insight on the Trinity from my studies at Fuller; I read, heard, and discussed enough to know that the Trinity is a historical piece of orthodoxy from the earliest authors in the church down to the present day. However, I had not taken such time to steep in the questions around the Trinity, its nuances, and its distortions. This one-week course allowed me to do just that.
After taking this course I can now say with firm conviction (standing with the whole church throughout history) that the Trinity is a necessary doctrine for the church. If we believe the witness of the Scriptures and the person of Jesus Christ, we cannot deny—and we cannot overlook—the Trinity. This statement is important for me not because I had failed to believe in the Trinity before I took this course. Rather, this statement breaks new ground for me because I had not realized my inability to articulate an understanding of the Trinity and its importance reflects what I think is a wider ignorance of the Trinity in the church.
If we did a "man on the street" experiment with the church, asking "What is the Trinity?" what do you suppose we would find? How would most devoted, church-going, Bible-reading, daily-praying folks answer that question?
I know that before I went to seminary I might be able to muster the basic answer: "God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." But that might be all. If you pressed me on it, I would be at pains to give an answer that held up to orthodox scrutiny. I’d probably say something that, strictly speaking, smacked of heresy. Even the week before our thirty hours of discussion focused solely on this divine mystery I might have been caught in something untoward if examined in too rigorous detail. After all, it is a mystery. The Trinity is something that many believe is so shrouded in mystery that it is better to say too little than too much. In fact, this has kept many people from embarking on the very sort of journeys on which we found ourselves during this course.
The problem is that the Scriptures speak of one God, Yahweh. Excuse me, that’s ONE God, Yahweh. There is no other. Yahweh alone is God, is Lord over all creation, life and death. The whole of the Old Testament is adamant about this, as is the New Testament. But in the New Testament we find something strange. We find these good Jews and honest Gentiles confessing that Jesus is Lord. Prayers are directed to Jesus and folks are healed in the name of Jesus even though all who pray and ask for healing know that Yahweh alone is Lord of creation, life, and health. By saying that "Jesus is Lord" they are doing something paradoxical. They are saying that Jesus, a human being, has the status of Yahweh. But there is still only one Yahweh—they know and confess this. So we have a mystery, a Binity, if you will, in the person of Jesus.
And so we must. Only Yahweh can save. But if we are to be saved, then all of our humanity must be taken up by Yahweh; and this happens in Jesus Christ. If we say that Yahweh is God and Jesus is just a really cool human, then Yahweh is God and we are not saved. If we say that Jesus is Yahweh, then we are saved indeed. But we are also stuck with a mystery. How can Yahweh (whom humans cannot glimpse and live) become human? The mystery of the Binity is also the mystery of the Incarnation. We may not be able to explain it well, but we need it to have life.
Enter the Spirit. Old and New Testaments speak of the Spirit of Yahweh, the Spirit of God. Jesus speaks of the Spirit in a unique way, declaring that the Spirit will be sent to fill the church after Jesus has ascended. Once again we come up with a problem. If the church is to dwell in the fullness of life, she must have the fullness of the one who is Life. She must have Yahweh. Therefore the Spirit must also be Yahweh. If not, then the church does not dwell with the fullness of Yahweh. If so, we’ve got three persons who are all Yahweh: Father, Son, and Spirit.
All the ink spilled over this issue, over the last two thousand years, wrestles with this evidence. I am now convinced that it is worthwhile to wrestle with it in Bible studies, discussions within the church, and in sermons when the Scriptures warrant. If we are called to understand Yahweh then we are called to wrestle with Yahweh’s Triune nature.
Two of the members of the class, when asked on the first day why they had enrolled, said that they had been preaching for years in their local parishes. They said that every year Trinity Sunday comes around, and they hand off preaching that day to someone else because they don’t know how to preach on a Sunday devoted to the Trinity. Now, the Presbyterian churches in the States give and take the liturgical calendar. But I hope and pray that as a result of this course I may be better equipped to preach about the Trinity when that Sunday rolls around. And may my words carry the inspiration of the Spirit to know better this great mystery of the nature of Yahweh by whom we are called and whom we worship.
~emrys